A Tidewater Morning by William Styron

name—was the proprietor of Quigley’s Store, an all-purpose emporium that stood on a barren tract of land just east of the village. It was a squat, nondescript place made of brick painted a bleached blue with a squeaking screen door and two windows nearly opaque with dust where one neon sign, reading pabst blue ribbon, pulsed spiritlessly, and the other, reading schlitz, was permanently dark. I imagine that if one could smell a Hogarth drawing, it would smell of gin; the interior of Quigley’s Store, Hogarthian in its dim clutter and squalor, smelled of spilled beer, cigarette smoke, and unwashed floors. After four o'clock a flock of shipyard workers gathered there every weekday afternoon to knock down bottles of beer at the round metal-topped tables in the rear of the store; they were a sullen lot, mostly displaced North Carolinians who had come to the area to make a few desperately needed shipyard dollars, and they lolled around in near-silence in the murk, chewing on pickled pigs' feet from a rotund two-gallon jar and munching on pretzels. Up front was a magazine stand with its ranks of comic books, True Detectives, and Police Gazettes. Next to this sat a grimy soda fountain, seldom used, and a display case of candy bars where I could always see the halfdozen resident flies making their perpendicular strolls on the glass inside. There were two pinball machines whose bunk bong ding, ding bunk bong was a constant background monotone. After the five miles of my paper route I was invariably sweat-soaked and nearly faint with thirst. So, together with the two or three other boys straggling in, I would head straight for the red enamel storage chest where, alongside the beer, the Coca-Colas were kept, and the Nehi and the Orange Crush and the Hires root beer. No stately automated dispensers in those days, no color-coordinated sevenfoot-tall designer model popping out its temperature-regulated frosted can into the dry and welcoming palm. One went instead to the case where the bottles stood in water cooled by ice, withdrew a Coca-Cola or a Dr Pepper refreshingly damp between one’s fingers. In all civilized establishments the water was changed regularly; at Quigley’s the water stagnated week in and week out, and the malodorous bottle, withdrawn, was slimy to the touch. Whenever I would hurry to the case and open the top, Mr. Quigley would be waiting with his smudged and tattered notebook, pencil poised.
    “What are you having, Whitehurst?” he would ask. In those stuffier times businessmen were often on a last-name basis with their employees, but though I was a boy, it would have taken someone less rigidly uncharitable than Mr. Quigley to call me Paul. I hated the stingy bastard.
    “I’m having a root beer,” I would reply.
    And I’d watch him as he’d scratch my name in his notebook, or indite some intricate cross-reference or computation, and dock me five cents. Mr. Quigley’s ethnicity was somewhat odd for a native Virginian; it was said that his mother was Greek. He was a swarthy, pinched-face little man with a pronounced curvature of the spine that twisted him slightly sideways and gave him a limp. Was it this handicap, producing some inner misery of spirit—I occasionally wondered later (having become less uncharitable myself)—that disposed him to his lack of generosity? I was not so impractical or dumb about finance, especially at that time, when a dollar was worth a dollar, to begrudge Mr. Quigley his concern about the attrition that many unaccounted-for Coca-Colas or Hershey bars would produce against his profits. I did resent, though, the absence in him of any hint of humor or benevolence—for I was still enough of a child to expect the preferential decency, at least, that a child is supposed to receive—and I resented most of all that never once ( never once, never once, I would mutter to myself as I slogged across the lawns deep in garden-hose damp and dog shit) did he offer me a small treat, gratis.